In 1952, because she refused to testify against her husband at the HUAC hearings, she was blacklisted from most acting jobs for the next ten years, her prime as an actress. She was then only able to find occasional work on the stage or as a teacher during that period. It also contributed to her divorce.

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Lee Grant was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal[2][3] in Manhattan, the only child of Witia (née Haskell), an actress and teacher, and Abraham W. Rosenthal, a realtor and educator. Her father was born in New York City, to Polish Jewish immigrants, and her mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant.[4] The family resided at 706 Riverside Drive in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.[5] Her date of birth is October 31 but the year is disputed with all years ranging from 1925 to 1931 having been given as her year of birth at some point; however, census data, travel manifests and testimony suggest that she was born in 1925 or 1926, while Grant's stated ages at the time of her professional debut and Oscar nomination indicate she was born in 1927.[1][a]

Grant had her first stage ballet performance in 1933 at the Metropolitan Opera House.[18] In 1938, in her early teens, she was made a member of the American Ballet, under George Balanchine.[18] As an actress, Grant had her professional stage debut as understudy in Oklahoma in 1944. In 1948 had her Broadway acting debut in Joy to the World. Grant established herself as a dramatic method actress on and off Broadway, earning praise for her role as a shoplifter in Detective Story in 1949.[19]

But as quickly as that dream unfolded, her life soon turned into a nightmare... So right when her career should have been blooming, she was banned from working in Hollywood. And that ban lasted for twelve years, a lifetime for an actor.

In 1951, she gave an impassioned eulogy at the memorial service for actor J. Edward Bromberg, whose early death, she implied, was caused by the stress of being called before House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). After her eulogy was published, she was summoned by the same committee to testify against her husband, playwright Arnold Manoff, but refused. As a result, for the next ten years, her "prime years", as she put it,[23] she was blacklisted and her work in television and movies was limited.[24]

Kirk Douglas, who acted with her in Detective Story, recalled that director Edward Dmytryk, a blacklistee, had first named her husband at the HUAC:

Lee was only a kid, a beautiful young girl with extraordinary talent and a big future. You could see it. She was so good that she earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her very first film role. But because Eddie Dmytryk named her husband, Lee Grant was blacklisted before her film career even had a chance to begin. Of course, she refused to testify about the man to whom she was married, and it took years before anyone would hire her for another picture.[25]

By the time her name was finally removed from the blacklist in the early 1960s, she had since been divorced, remarried, and had a young daughter, Dinah. She began re-establishing her television and movie career. In her autobiography, she writes:

Dinah was my grail, my constant; nothing and no one could get between us. Dinah and my need to support her financially, morally, viscerally, and my rage at those who had taken twelve working, acting years from my life, were what motivated me.[27]:250

Her experience with the blacklist scarred her to such an extent that as late as 2002, she would freeze and go into a "near trance" when anyone asked her about her experiences during the McCarthy period.[28]

Grant's first major achievement, after HUAC officially cleared her, was in the 1960s television series Peyton Place, as Stella Chernak, for which she won an Emmy in 1966. In 1967, Grant appeared in an episode of Mission Impossible, portraying the wife of a U.S. diplomat who goes undercover to discredit a rogue diplomat. That same year, she played the distraught widow of a murder victim in the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night. In 1963, she won acclaim for her stage performance in the off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Maids.[18][29]

Also in 1971, she played cold-blooded killer Leslie Williams on the second episode ("Ransom for a Dead Man") of the Peter Falk series Columbo. She would appear with Falk again on Broadway Prisoner of Second Avenue, whose playwright Neil Simon said that his "first and only choice" for the part was Grant, who he said was equally at home with dramatists such as Chekhov or Sidney Kingsley, yet could also be "hilariously funny" when the script called for it, as she was able to portray essential honesty in her acting.[30]

Among her most notable roles was as Warren Beatty's older lover in Shampoo (1975), for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The film received mixed reviews, but was Columbia's biggest hit in the studio's 50-year history.[31]Shampoo was the second film in which Grant acted under director Hal Ashby. Critic Pauline Kael, comparing her in both films, noted Grant "is such a cool-style comedienne that she's in danger of having people say that she's good, as usual."[32] During the filming, however, she did have some serious disagreements with Beatty, who was also the producer, and nearly quit. During one scene, she wanted to play it in a way she felt was more realistic from a woman's perspective, but Beatty disagreed. After thinking about the scene for a few days, she told director Ashby that she could not do it Beatty's way and was quitting. As she was walking out, Beatty stopped her and asked what was wrong. "I sat down and told him", she said. "He threw up his hands and said, 'Play it your way. What do I know? I'm a man.'"[33]

Grant in 1975

Despite the success of the film, Grant was feeling less secure in Hollywood as she was then around fifty years old. She writes:

I was becoming my own worst enemy as an actor, traumatized onstage and fixated on staying young so I could keep working in film. A woman of a certain age does not play in movies or TV; we're kicked to the side or out. And I was a woman of a certain age, terrified I'd be found out and unemployed again."[27]:213

In March 1971, Grant appeared in the Columbo episode "Ransom for a Dead Man"', and was nominated for an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress - Miniseries or a Movie. Having been nominated for two performances in the same acting category, she received the award for her other Emmy-nominated performance in the television film, The Neon Ceiling. The only other nominee was Colleen Dewhurst; in Grant's acceptance speech, she wryly noted, "I must thank Colleen Dewhurst since it takes two of me to equal one of her."[citation needed]

During the 1975-76 television season, she starred in the NBCsitcomFay, which, to her chagrin, was canceled after eight episodes. She made a guest appearance on Empty Nest, in which her daughter Dinah Manoff co-starred.

Grant is the only Hollywood actress of her generation to successfully move into directing. She directed the stage play, The Stronger in 1976, written by August Strindberg.

In 1980, Grant directed her first film, Tell Me a Riddle, a story about an aging Jewish couple. She starred a HBO remake of Plaza Suite in 1982, costarring Jerry Orbach, both playing three different characters in three acts. It was filmed before a live audience.[34][35]

In 1988, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who through their endurance and the excellence of their work have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.[38]

Admiring her directing and acting skill, actress Sissy Spacek agreed to act in Hard Promises (1991) "only to work with Grant", although Grant was later replaced as its director.[39] In 1992, Grant played Dora Cohn, the mother of Roy Cohn in the biographical made-for-TV film Citizen Cohn, which garnered her yet another Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

In 2013 she returned to the stage, after a nearly forty-year absence, to star in The Gin Game, part of a benefit for improvement programs at the Island Music Guild. Grant played Fonsia Dorsey opposite Frank Buxton as Weller Martin; her daughter Dinah Manoff directed the production.[41]

^ abcGrant's date of birth is October 31 but discord exists between sources over year, giving every year between 1925 and 1931.

Mid-1920s: Rickey, Carrie (July 17, 2014), "'I Said Yes to Everything', by Lee Grant", SFGate.com, retrieved January 22, 2017, Lyova Rosenthal was born in the mid-1920s. The granddaughter of Polish and Russian immigrants is famously inexact about her age. From her mid-20s to her mid-30s, the blacklist left her unemployable in TV and film, so she lied about her years, whatever they were, to remain viable as an actress.

Aged 24 in April/May 1952: Lee Grant (October 2016). "Lee Grant". Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast! (Interview). Interview with Gilbert Gottfried. 11 minutes 41 seconds. Retrieved January 27, 2017. Grant: I was nominated and I was given the Best Actress Award in Cannes in 1952; Gottfried: So here you are and I think you were 24 at the time so this is like your career is exploding and then what happens then?

^"United States Public Records, 1970-2009," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QJZ3-MSLD : 23 May 2014), Lee Grant Manoff, Residence, Wilmington, Delaware, United States; a third party aggregator of publicly available information.

^The 1930 census (Source Citation: Year: 1930; Census Place: Manhattan, New York, New York; Roll: 1577; Page: 11B; Enumeration District: 1027; Image: 588.0; FHL microfilm: 2341312. Source Information: Ancestry.com. 1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2002. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls) gives her age as 4 and 6/12 months (i.e. 4 ½ years old). (NOTE: a) the census always requests the age of the individual being enumerated as of his or her last birthday; b) the first name is misspelled, as "Lyniva"). View original document at FamilySearch

^The 1940 census (Source Citation: Year: 1940; Census Place: New York, New York, New York; Roll: T627_2671; Page: 9A; Enumeration District: 31-1922. Source Information: Ancestry.com. 1940 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc. 2012. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940. T627, 4,643 rolls) gives her age as 14 in April 1940 (NOTE: a) the census always requests the age of the individual being enumerated as of his or her last birthday; b) the first name is misspelled as "Lyoua"). View original document at FamilySearch and FamilyTreeNow.

^ abLee Grant (October 2016). "Lee Grant". Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast! (Interview). Interview with Gilbert Gottfried. 11 minutes 41 seconds. Retrieved January 27, 2017. Grant: I was nominated and I was given the Best Actress Award in Cannes in 1952; Gottfried: So here you are and I think you were 24 at the time so this is like your career is exploding and then what happens then?